pennyspoetryfandomcom-20200214-history
Fenton Johnson (poet)
Fenton Johnson (May 7, 1888 - September 17, 1958) was an African-American poet. Life Youth Johnson was born in Chicago, to parents Jesse (Taylor) and Elijah Johnson. Elijah Johnson, was a railroad porter and his family was one of the wealthiest African American families in Chicago during this time. That his family owned the State Street building in which they lived provides evidence of such a financial security. In a biographical note by Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson is described as being “a dapper boy who drove his own electric automobile around Chicago.”Arne Bontemps, “Fenton Johnson,” American Negro Poetry: An anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1996) 222-223. Accessed on Google eBooks 26 Oct 2011 Growing up, Johnson recounts himself as "having scribbled since the age of nine," but even despite these indications of a literary inclination, he did not initially plan to embark on a career in letters, and certainly not poetry specifically. Rather, throughout his childhood, Johnson intended to pursue an office in the clergy.Elizabeth Sanders and Delwiche Engelhardt, “Fenton Johnson,” The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 229. Accessed on Google eBooks 26 Oct 2011 The entirety of Johnson’s childhood was spent in Chicago, and he received his secondary education at various secondary public schools in the city, including Englewood High School and Wendell Phillips High School. Johnson began his undergraduate education at Northwestern University, which he attended 1908-1909. He went on to complete his degree at the University of Chicago. Johnson later earned a degree from the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City. Following his graduation from the University of Chicago, Fenton worked as a messenger and in the post office before he began to teach English at the State University of Louisville, which was a private, black, Baptist-owned institution in Kentucky that would later would become Simmons College. He taught at the State University of Louisville 1910-1911, but returned to Chicago in 1911 to concentrate on his literary career. Career In 1913, Johnson published his 1st volume of poetry, A Little Dreaming. The collection was a self-published work, along with his next 2 collections, Visions of the Dusk (1915) and Songs of the Soil (1916). But between the release of the earliest 2 books, Fenton Johnson moved to New York, where he completed his degree at the Pulitzer School of Journalism with the financial support of a benefactor. Following the release of his 3rd book of poetry, Johnson moved back to Chicago, where he became a founding editor of The Champion in 1916. The Champion was formed in conjunction with Henry Bing Dismon, his cousin, who was also an aspiring poet and popular athlete, one of the few African American college graduates chosen for officer training with the Army’s Eighth Illinois Regiment at Camp Des Moines in 1918. The publication focused on black achievements and was published monthly. 2 years after founding The Champion, in 1918, Johnson went on to found The Favorite Magazine, subtitled The World’s Greatest Monthly, with Dismond.Lorenzo Thomas. “African Modernism and Twentieth Century American Poetry,” Extraordinary Measures (University of Alabama Press, 2000). Accessed via worldcat.org on 26 Oct 2011 The Favorite Magazine published a few of Johnson’s poems, and around this time Johnson’s short stories were also being published in The Crisis. In addition, Johnson published his own collection of short stories entitled Tales of Darkest America in 1920. In the same year, he published a book of essays entitled For the Highest Good. During this period as well, from about 1912 and following through 1925, Johnson established connections in Chicago with the Harriet Monroe group, and several of his poems were accepted for the poetry magazine Poetry.Venetria K. Patton & Maureen Honey, Double-take: A revisionist Harlem Renaissance anthology (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2011) 268. Accessed on Google eBooks 26 Oct 2011 Johnson also found publication in the anthology formed by poet Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 called Others: A magazine of the new verse. “Tired,” perhaps his best-known poem, was published in 1919 in Others, and was also published in The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922, (among other poems of his). Johnson completed or nearly completed a 4th collection of poems entitled African Nights, but he did not succeed in publishing the collection.Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973) 179-180. Accessed on Google eBooks 26 Oct 2011 In addition to his poetry, editing, and essay writing, Johnson also worked as a playwright. By the age of nineteen, he says, Johnson plays had been “produced on the stage of the old Pekin Theatre, Chicago.” In 1925, his play entitled “The Cabaret Girl” was performed at the Shadow Theatre in Chicago, the only performed play of his on record. In the 1930s, Johnson worked for the Federal Writers’ Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Chicago. Directed by Arna Bontemps, the Federal Writers’ Project focused on writing about the black experience in Illinois. Private life Johnson was married to Cecilia Rhone. He was a member of the Authors League of America and of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. He died in Chicago. Arna Bontemps was his literary executor. Writing Johnson’s earlier poems were made in more “conventional modes,” including dialect poetry, as found in his 1st book, A Little Dreaming. The collection considered a wide range of topics, from a poem on Paul Laurence Dunbar (entitled “Dunbar”), to medieval themes such as in “Lancelot’s Defiance.”Fenton Johnson, A Little Dreaming ''(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, 1997) Accessed via americanverseproject.org Additionally, ''A Little Dreaming contains a customary Scottish poem, Irish poem, and even Yiddish poem, which points to a whole range of poetic influences during the early part of his poetic career. In Visions of the Dusk and Songs of the Soil, Johnson begins to incorporate “Negro spirituals,” and here the transition into themes more heavily influenced by the African American experience might be observed. Johnson's poetry has often been noted by critics as characterized by great irony and a kind of hopelessness resulting from an embattled African American experience. In his introduction to Fenton Johnson in The Book of American Negro Poetry, James Weldon Johnson writes that in many of his poems, “there is nothing left to fight or even hope for.” Yet, James Weldon Johnson continues, “these poems of despair possess tremendous power and constitute Fenton Johnson’s best work.” Fenton Johnson is often seen as a poet who possesses a particularly fatalistic perspective branching from his experience as an African American, and this type of embittered poetry is what he is most known for. James Weldon Johnson also makes a few claims about Fenton Johnson’s earlier works, calling his 1st book of poetry, A Little Dreaming, “without marked distinction.”James Weldon Johnson. “Fenton Johnson,” The Book of American Negro Poetry. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931). 1940-41 Johnson also indicates in his introduction that it was during the war period that Fenton Johnson adopted free verse, and “broke away from all traditions and ideas of Negro Poetry.” This newfound “formlessness,” Johnson found, “voiced the disillusionment and bitterness of feeling the Negro race was then experiencing.” For James Weldon Johnson, then, Fenton Johnson’s poetry became associated with despair, and such was how Johnson became framed within the larger The Book of the American Negro Poetry project, and subsequently in other anthologies. This “bitter” Fenton is particularly encapsulated in the lines of his poem “Tired”: “I am tired of work. I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization,” the poem reads. Fenton Johnson has a particular legacy within American Modernist poetry. He is noted to have been a part of writers who would become the makers of a “new” poetry, which sought to “throw over the traditions of American Poetry,” as James Weldon Johnson would describe it. These “new” poems appeared in Poetry, Others and later, The Liberator, and they marked a progression from “commonplace traditionalism to the most revolutionary naturalism, from the rhymed, carefully scanned line to free verse, from conventionalized Negro dialect to the brawny language of Sandberg’s Chicago Poems.” In Songs of the Soil, Johnson writes that “The Negro has a history, and it is something more than a peasant.” Transitioning from here to the poem “Tired,” we might find the “black revolutionary poet” that James Weldon Johnson proclaims Fenton Johnson to be and how many perceive him today. Recognition Johnson has had a consistent presence in anthologies beginning with the Book of American Negro Poetry, Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin’s The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Verse in English (1923) and Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927). Publications Poetry *''A Little Dreaming. Chicago: Peterson Linotyping, 1913; College Park, MD: McGrath, 1969. *Visions of the Dusk. New York: privately published, 1915; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. *Songs of the Soil. New York: privately published, 1916; New York: AMS Press, 1975. *''The Daily Grind (pamphlet). London: Paul Breman, 1994. Short fiction *''Tales of Darkest America''. Chicago: Favorite Magazine, 1920. Non-fiction *''For the Highest Good'' (essays). Chicago: Favorite Magazine, 1920. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Fenton Johnson, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Oct. 11, 2014. Poems by Fenton Johnson #A Dream See also *List of U.S. poets References External links ;Poems *"The Banjo Player" at the Academy of American Poets *Fenton Johnson in The Book of American Negro Poetry: "Children of the Sun," "The New Day," "Tired," "The Banjo Player," "The Scarlet Woman." *Johnson in Poetry: A magazine of verse, 1912-1922: "The Lost Love," "How Long, O Lord!," "Who is That A-walking in the Corn?," "A Dream," "The Wonderful Morning" *Fenton Johnson at AllPoetry (122 poems) ;Audio / video *Fenton Johnson at YouTube ;Books *Fenton Johnson at Amazon.com ;About *Fenton Johnson in the Oxford Companion to African American Literature *Fenton Johnson: A Chicago poet at African American Registry *Johnson, Fenton in the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. * Category:American poets Category:African American writers Category:1888 births Category:1958 deaths Category:20th-century poets Category:Poets Category:English-language poets Category:Modernist poets Category:African American poets